Customizing Cognos Analytics across all roles

The IBM® Cognos® Analytics user interface is built on an extensible model. In this model, the user interface screens are defined as views (such as home, authoring, dashboard, and modeler). You can customize these views for all users and roles by adding and removing user interface elements, such as buttons and menus. You can define new views to extend the Cognos Analytics user interface. You can also replace the default home page and sign-in page or substitute your own branding (colors, logos, and brand text) for the default branding on all views.

Customizations are packaged as compressed files that contain a spec.json file that defines the customization. The compressed file can also contain other files, depending on the type of the customization. Customizations can also be included in deployments.

You manage customizations for all users and roles with the Manage > Customizations slide-out panel. You use this panel to upload your customizations to the Cognos Analytics server, and to select which customizations to use.

Note:

When you use the Manage > Customizations slide-out panel, your customizations are applied to all users and roles.

For example, if you upload the sample extension called SampleExtensionExcludeNotifications.zip, it will remove the Notifications icon from the Application Bar in the Home perspective for all users and roles. It will also remove the Notifications check box from the feature list when an administrator selects the properties of any role, clicks on the Customization tab, and navigates to Features > Home > Application bar.

Therefore, if your goal is to add or remove a feature for everyone in your Cognos environment, then you should use an extension. If your goal is to provide users and roles with different features, you should use individual role customization, rather than an extension.

If you use role customizations to set specific features for user roles and then apply an extension that is based on those features, the extension will override all of your role customizations.

To assign home pages, features, themes, custom folders, and parameters to particular roles, use the Manage > Accounts > Namespaces slide-out panel. For more information, see Customizing roles.

To assign custom themes and home pages to particular tenants, use the Manage > Multitenacy slide-out panel, and from the tenant properties panel, select the Customization tab. For more information, see Customizing tenants.

Some types of customizations require the use of the JavaScript programming language. These customizations are described in the following topics.

The other types of customizations do not require any programming knowledge.

The JSON schemas that are used to define customizations are provisional and can change in future releases of Cognos Analytics in a way that is not compatible with earlier versions.